Oh man, it really is. I’ve got some family pretty deep in the Smokies, and even if deserts out West are technically more remote, those mountains sure feel more isolating.

We’ve got lots of crawlspaces under houses, though!

He would fit in better in Rancho Santa Fe. Guess he just wanted the ocean view.

Technically you mean La Jolla, San Diego, California, as La Jolla is not a city no matter how much they like to pretend they are.

books are friends

Yay pelicans!

It’s pretty solidly in the science fiction literature canon (despite Atwood’s protests that it’s not science fiction) so that fandom knows it, but it’s not done in high schools because of obvious reasons.

Clinton would’ve told us about UFOs for sure. *kicks dirt*

There’s actually a musical on attempted/successful presidential assassinations, and I’ll bet that’s one of the more American sentences you’ve read today. Neil Patrick Harris was Lee Harvey Oswald in the revival!

You’re insufficiently pessimistic, here. In a big enough fire, no amount of political or monetary power will help, as we are but cosmic specks, etc., etc. A decent chunk of Rancho Santa Fe burned in 2007, and they’re rich as Croesus out there.

Throwing in some specifics to this thread: Scripps Ranch got got bad in ’03 and RB got it bad in ’07, but nothing burned in 4S Ranch in ’07 even though the fire got right up close (and I mean RIGHT up close, really really fucking close) and fire-resistant building and landscaping certainly at least helped.

Every so often someone tries to sell these Florida avocado varieties with the “low fat” label and it never works, because they’re gross and watery and nasty.

Fuck their stadiums and fuck the Chargers.

Yeah, I mean…Gopher Canyon Road? Really?

Oh, I was arguing against the pro-arbitrary-rectangle dude up there! Thought you were agreeing with them rather than just in the same conversation thread, my bad.

I think that congressional districts should be attempts to have representatives of communities, and not representatives of rectangles.

Because minority populations tend to be clustered and there are more ways for a rectangle to break up a cluster than not, it’s not possible so much as certain. There needs to be a human, nonrectangular element that decides how to draw the districts, it just needs to be a nonpartisan one.

Here’s a fun thing to think about: this is constantly happening, which means that no matter how much you police your language, you’re still doing this exact mistake all the time relative to some point in the past.

You’d end up with districts with, like, impassable mountain ranges running down the middle. And minority communities would be cut up and have less impact. And definitely some other problems I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Being stuck with old districts would suck. Look at the counties of California: